Grabbing a Bucket

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“LOVE TRUMPS HATE! LOVE TRUMPS HATE!”

“MUSLIM RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS!”

“SAY IT LOUD, SAY IT CLEAR! REFUGEES ARE WELCOME HERE!”

“NO TRUMP! NO K.K.K.! NO FASCIST U.S.A.!”

I stood in amazement at the corner of Boylston and Clarendon next to two dump trucks blocking the road. I had covered protests before, but they were typically small and uncoordinated. This one was well-organized chaos with all types of people chanting in unison. After taking in the breadth of the rally, I opened my bag and fixed an 18-135mm lens on my Canon and ventured into the legion.

It was January 27, 2017, when President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13769, effectively banning immigrants from one of seven Muslim-majority nations—Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The ban felt unethical, but not illogical.

In the Marines, I learned something nerve-wracking—security is an illusion. Growing up near an Air Force base, I remember seeing armed guards and barbed wire fences. To my eyes, that was the safest place I could imagine. After I enlisted, however, I saw the reality—fences break, people get lazy, and little can stop a person with determination. So, when I thought of the immigrant ban, I thought of reality. If ISIS wants to get in as refugees, it will.

A day later, a man named Danny would change my mind. But, Let’s rewind back to the beginning.

It was cold.

Sada Naji and her husband, Wisam, were in the basement of a rural hospital north of Baghdad. The chugging blasts of bombs could be heard in the distance as Wisam helped Sada into their concrete and metal room. She was pregnant and in labor.

“I was pregnant when the Persian Gulf War started. Oops!”

I chortled.

Sada, Wisam, and Danny are sitting on a posh couch in Woburn, Mass. They’re sitting affectionately close to each other, bathed in the soft orange light of a chandelier. Flanked to their left is a beautifully designed palm tree made of precious metals. To their right, an image of Danny’s baptism in the Charles River. On the table before me are crackers, cheese, and homemade hummus with an unusually sophisticated flavor. It’s been over a year since I first met Danny and his family welcomed me into their home to tell me their journey.

“So,” I said, letting the word linger as I tried to gather my thoughts. “Tell me about Danny’s birth.”

At the start of the Persian Gulf War, Sada and Wisam fled north of Baghdad on a tip, just before the first bombs fell, to a small farming town called Alrashedeah. Sada was 9 months pregnant.

Terrified, they could still hear the “fireworks,” as Sada calls them, erupting south of their position. Worried about chemical weapons, they pushed further north to Shahraban, Diyala to stay upwind. If things got really bad, Wisam told me, they had a plan to flee to Iran. On the night of February 9th, Sada went into labor.

Wisam drove the family to a clinic in Baqubah, a nearby city that would later become the site of a furious insurgency during the Iraq War. As she exited his car, Sada noticed Wisam had brought his veterinarian surgery equipment—just in case he would have to deliver the baby himself. Once they arrived at the clinic they were safe from the bombing, but there wasn’t much comfort to find.

“Inside, of course, it was very dark,” Sada remembered, “It was very cold.”

As Sada began to give birth, she cried out in pain.

“Of course, I was crying from the pain,” she said, “but at the same time I was crying from the cold. I was freezing, it was February in the basement of a clinic.” Without heat or electricity, Sada’s body temperature began to drop to dangerous levels. Wisam and Sada’s Dad, without any other options, went back outside amidst the bombs and foraged for twigs to lights a fire.

Her son, Danny, was born the next morning on a Sunday. He was blue. Normally, a hospital would use modern incubators to bring a baby’s temperature back to normal. Without power, however, the clinic’s incubators were useless.

“So, immediately my mom cleaned him, wrapped him in a blanket, and used the fire,” Sada recalled with a slight tremble. With the uncertainty of danger mounting, they didn’t wait long at the clinic.

Sada leaned into the couch for a moment. She dabbed her eyes and apologized. Wisam leaned over and rubbed her back affectionately. I thought that she was upset from the memory of a grim experience, but her next words proved me ignorant.

“When I think about it, it’s really a lot of emotions,” she said, “because of the love and care that I had. Dad and Wisam and mom and all the people that I love, they were around me in that tough time. And I had this beautiful baby.”

She wasn’t sad, she was happy. She remembers the frigid basement night filled with bombs and peril. Her reaction is to focus on the love she felt from those around.

“My parents didn’t give me a name,” Danny said with a laugh, breaking the tension. “They just named me Tuna,” for the first two or three months. I stared at Danny, squinting my eyes at the peculiar name. “Tuna,” I repeated questioningly. He slapped the table and yelled “Tuna!”

Wisam said that the family wanted to give him a name that was Western, but also meaningful. Danny (not Daniel), he said, captured their imagination. “God is my judge,” he said of the names meaning, “and in Arabic, close to the heart.”

After the chaos of his birth, it was decided that the family could not stay in Iraq. Sada recalled a conversation she had with her own mother, “She said you were born in private hospitals with doctors and high class in the 60s, and now, here we are in ‘91, and your son is born on a concrete floor.“ It was clear that Iraq was moving backward and, as a religious minority, it would only get worse.

“We had to leave the country,” Wisam said.

While Danny was still an infant, Wisam and Sada went to work to find passage out of Iraq. Emigrating from Iraq was deadly business, so they sought refugee status from a Western country. This, however, required paperwork and in-person attention. As Danny puts it, “The vetting process from end-to-end is incredibly thorough.”

Unable to complete the process in Iraq, Wisam hatched a plan—he made up a disease. Using their status as veterinarians as cover, they traveled to the border with clothes and a microscope. When they reached the border, an Iraqi intelligence agent pulled them aside for questioning. Trying to flee the country would mean death. During the interrogation, Wisam pointed to his microscope and told the agent that they were doctors going to investigate a new disease spreading into Iraq from Jordan.

“They don’t have microscopes in Jordan?” the agent asked.

“Would you give your gun to someone else?” Wisam responded.

Wisam let out a hearty laugh at the absurdity of it. I chuckled too, finding the dark humor in their story. Their lives hung in a balance on a lie. The agent let them through.

“I stayed there for over a month,” Wisam said of his time in Amman, Jordan. “I tried every single embassy, and I was not even able to enter the building. Nobody wants to see you.” Wisam, desperate and running out of options, started to lose hope. That’s when a friend he was staying with struck an idea.

Wisam and Sada were successful veterinarians in Baghdad. Many of their clients were the pets of foreign ambassadors to Iraq. Thinking of those friendships, Wisam wrote seven handwritten letters and dropped them off at embassies.

I laughed, interrupting Wisam’s story. I’d grown up in an era of war and terrorism. Between anthrax scares and mail bombs, I couldn’t conceive of an embassy just accepting a strange letter from an unknown man addressed to a powerful international figure. That would be unsafe. Of the seven, Wisam knows that six made it to their destinations.

It was the Italian Ambassador that called first.

After speaking with Wisam, the Italian Ambassador worked with Ambassadors from Spain and Portugal, both of whom also knew Wisam. While he was waiting for their decision, Wisam said, “it was like drowning.”

Eventually, they secured safe passage into Spain for Wisam, Sada, and Danny. After a brief return to Iraq to take care of their affairs, Sada’s family bought round-trip tickets to Jordan to evade suspicion, where the trio hopped a flight to Madrid. Upon arrival, they were placed in a United Nations refugee camp to begin the process of residency applications for various nations. After a tense period of paperwork and finding a sponsor, they moved to America and settled in Boston. They were safe.

After entering the country, Wisam and Sada thought of changing their family name. As a religious minority in Iraq, Mandaeans were often subject to abuse, even genocide. To survive, the Mandaean community began using Arabic names and gave up their traditional Mandaean names. At the time, they were using the name al-Haider.

Danny slowed down when he said “al-Haider” and paused. His eyes narrowed, and he tilted his head side-to-side like he was weighing something. “When you put the vowel at the beginning, that’s an automatic indication that you’re an Arab.” Danny leaned back in his chair and let out a long sigh.

“Literally the next day [after 9/11] I was beaten up by a bunch of kids at school.”

Danny’s words took the breath out of me.

Danny’s voice steadied as he recalls the violence. His body relaxed, and eyes dipped on the ends in compassionate recollection. “I think Americans are more open despite what we’ve seen here.”

I thought back to my own insecurities post-9/11. As a 13-year-old boy, I remember staring at the screen as images of towers falling replayed over-and-over. To this day, conversation of United 93 will bring tears to my eyes. Growing up in conservative Upstate New York, diversity was scarce. So, at the time, my beliefs drifted towards a unilateral approach of security. My parents taught me that most people are good, and evil is rare. But, I watched the consequence of unchecked evil on TV at 13 years old. Nearly a decade later, I enlisted in the Marine Corps. Among other reasons, I had a nagging anger in my mind about 9/11. I wanted to help “get” those who had hurt us. I wondered if the boys that hit Danny were like me. Did I share in their cruelty?

Danny’s bruises didn’t go unnoticed by Wisam.

“It just wasn’t something that he wanted to stomach,” Danny said, “You know, he wanted to pursue a life that was free of persecution. That’s why we came here in the first place.”

“It’s really become a very sad time after 9/11,” Wisam later told me. “I was saddened by how much we were starting to distrust each other within our society.”

Between the backlash after 9/11 and the wish to finally embrace a name his family had hidden for so long, Wisam and Sada changed their family name to Breegi. Out of the darkness of post-9/11 violence, there shone a bright realization—They didn’t have to hide their identity anymore.

“My dad was like, we should be embracing our real name,” Danny said.

Within the Mandaean community, “Breegi” was a well-known name that was never used in front of outsiders to survive religious violence. After coming to America, Wisam discovered that Mandaean people had been victimized by a genocide about once every 75 years. Now, they were free to use their original and historic Mandaean name. Still, this doesn’t diminish what happened to Danny.

After his family changed their name to Breegi, his life leveled out. He was rarely bullied for his ethnicity anymore, although some of that could be attributed to a last name that sounds Italian and not Middle Eastern.

Danny went on to attend Boston University and attain a Master’s in Public Health. He also works at a biomedical device company founded by his father. Breegi Scientific just announced a new invention—A portable, low-cost infant incubator. That was precisely what Danny sorely needed when he was born.

Their good fortune, however, was isolated. The Mandaean friends, family and community they left behind struggled under the weight of continued religious persecution in the midst of the Iraq War. This led to a mass exodus and Wisam wanted to help others like he had been helped. So, he placed a call.

Using a complex network of resettlement agencies in combination with U.S. and U.N. officials, he put the family’s contact information on Mandaean internet forums so that the Breegis might sponsor other Mandaean families fleeing violence. According to Wisam, the posts said, “All the information is already there, and it’s signed. Put your information in, scan it, and send it to me.” They had “hundreds and hundreds” of applications. This was start of the biggest resettlement project of the Mandaean community to Worcester, Mass.

“It was questionable whether it’s a good idea because it was politically a dangerous situation that we put our information publicly printed on the Internet.” Despite the fear, however, they felt it would be a privilege to help others like they’d been helped.

“If you have the opportunity, the blessing, to help somebody—do it,” Wisam said. “There is no day like a day you would be blessed to have the privilege to help somebody.”

For the next five years, the Breegi family sponsored over 2,500 Mandaeans to immigrate to the United States and resettle in Worcester. It’s not been without its challenges. Worcester lacked many resources their faith required for burials, prayer and baptism. But with time, effort and help from the Worcester government, they were able to create a vibrant community. They could live  without fear in the warm embrace of the freedom to openly practice deeply held religious belief.

“People who leave dictatorships from around the world are in awe,” Danny said, referring to people like the Mandaean community. “They’re stunned at how free and amazing this country is.”

It’s the concept of freedom and how precious it is, that causes his family to chafe under the weight of anyone who would seek to stifle another from seeking the same freedom they worked so hard to attain. Things like the 2017 rhetoric challenging the status of future refugees and immigrants from Iraq.

My mind drifted back to growing up in Upstate New York. I’d never known fear, only an assumed entitlement to freedom. My family was upper middle class. We owned a boat. The biggest challenge we’d ever faced was bad grades in school and job security. Yet, here I was, sitting in front of Wisam and Sada, listening to their dangerous story, holding onto my isolationist belief founded in fear.

“The world’s always been on fire,” Danny said, interrupting my self examination. “You can’t just empower those people who want to keep fanning the flames. You have to grab a bucket and try to put out as much as you can. And I think that’s about as American, as humanist, and as tolerant as we could hope to possibly be.”

“This is a great country,” Sada said. “American people… I’m one of them. They’re a great people, big heart, intelligent. The humanity is real here. We should remember who we are.”

Who we are.

Sada didn’t exclude anyone from that statement. She meant herself, Wisam, Danny, Mandaeans, Boston. She meant me too. Wisam nodded his head in agreement while Danny looked on in admiration.

“Americans all come from war, poverty, and disease,” Danny told me when we were alone. “Just like these new refugees do.”

That’s why, when President Trump signed Executive Order 13769 banning refugees from countries like Iraq, Danny couldn’t stand by idly and watch people no different than his parents get turned away. So, he put on a Boston Red Sox jacket, grabbed an Iraqi flag, and traveled to Copley Square to join the thousands of other Americans protesting President Trump’s ban. He wanted to help people remember who we are.

That’s where I met Danny for the first time.

I had come to the rally to document as a journalist. I captured images of Muslim men and women praying outside a Catholic Church with gothic architecture beneath a sign that read “All Are Welcome Here.” I watched a man named Derek Rossi follow TV news cameras with a sign that read, “We can do this every week asshole.” In the road, I met a woman named Chris Corsac offering legal services with the ACLU, holding a sign written in English and Arabic.

At the time I felt the ban was heartless, but reasonable. We had to remain safe. We had to do what was necessary to protect ourselves. They couldn’t be trusted.

That’s when I saw a man wearing a Boston Red Sox track jacket and carrying an Iraqi flag draped across his shoulders. At the time, I found him strangely poetic.

I tapped him on the shoulder and introduced myself. He clapped me on the back and asked if I was a journalist. I replied, “Sort-of, I’m covering the protest but not for any publication. I just took your picture, could get your name for a caption?” He flashed a big smile.

“Well, my name is Danny Breegi, and I’m a refugee from Iraq.”

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